Lost Illusions: Marre Administers Plodding Portrait of an Opportunist
“There’s nothing worse than being bored with a boring man,” according to French writer Antoine Laurain. The statement applies to both the subject and the film Notre salut (A Man of His Time), an ambitious sophomore film from Emmanuel Marre, who perhaps overestimated the sustained interest an audience might have for a milquetoast Nazi collaborator named Henri Marre (a fictionalized account of the director’s own grandfather). While there’s much to enjoy from the lead performance from Swann Arlaud, who somehow manages to make crushing passivity part of the characterization rather than a perfunctory mechanism, Marre can’t quite wrench this saga (with a running time of two-and-a-half-hours) from the grip of banality. There’s a reason a name like Henri Marre was forgotten by time, and this familial excavation is perhaps a merely dark footnote best left for deliberation amongst his ancestors.
Defunct engineer Henri Marre (Arlaud) arrives in 1940 Vichy seeking a glorious reinvention of himself. France, divided into the occupied zone of the north and the ‘free zone’ of the south is a unique opportunity to peddle his political manifesto, Notre Salut. Willfully estranged from his wife and three teenage children, he wheedles his way into a position at the Unemployment Office, trying to make good on his desires to be a notable instrument in preserving the integrity of France.
What A Man of His Time fails to capture is the actual perspective of Henri’s motivations. The French language title Notre Salut references his self-published manifesto (nearly bankrupting the family) as a means to announcing his nationalist viewpoints, seeing an opportunity to catapult himself to a useful administrator formatting a more ‘efficient’ France. Simply put, he’s a man more focused on stealing undeserved reverence while maintaining self-preservation, a classic carpetbagger. The most significant self-aware moment arrives early on, when Henri’s palm is read at a party, where he is also called a fool to his face —- “Nothing remarkable will ever happen to you.” There’s no escaping the reality of Henri Marre as a milquetoast everyman.
Marre’s tonal approach is also sometimes bizarre, using anachronistic soundtrack selections and natural lighting while DP Olivier Boonjing employs a variety of sitcom styled zooms. The result feels like The Zone of Interest (2023) as if it were The Office. This is, quite starkly, a far cry from Marre’s co-directed debut Zero Fucks Given (2021) with Adele Exarchopoulos starring as an apathetic airline stewardess.
Attempts to humanize Henri beyond his unimpressive stature and devious actions arrives through correspondence with his wife. Her letters, read aloud omnisciently, suggest a complex mixture of resentment and frustration. She’s also willfully ignorant of just what her husband’s been up to, supposedly surprised to find the beautiful home he finally established for his family in Limoges used to belong to a Jewish family. Sandrine Blancke is also a standout, but her letters are often the most interesting, emotionally potent aspects of the script. Otherwise we’re treated to endless conversations related to the maneuverings of what’s going on in Vichy, the supposed ‘free state’ led by Marshal Petain, consistently painted as an out of touch dinosaur Henri blindly clings to as some kind of savior. He negotiates with the Germans to save French citizens from being deported to Germany for labor, cursing a horde of two-hundred Spanish and two-hundred Portuguese immigrants instead to take their place (Andrey Zvyagintsev eerily depicts a contemporary Russian executive employing a similar tactic in Minotaur, 2026).
But A Man of His Time never justifies its subject or its methods, even if one wishes to make an argument for it being another embodiment of Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil.’ Henri Marre was a garden variety hustler, a parasite sucking the marrow from its host, never having the prudence to realize he’s feeding off a corpse.
Reviewed on May 20th at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival (79th edition) – Competition. 155 Mins.
★★½/☆☆☆☆☆